Even In A Changing Society, Rituals Ring In The Holiday Season

December 20, 1991|By New York Times

Mention Christmas in most American households and visions of seasonal rituals dance like sugarplums.

Decorating the home, last-minute gift shopping and creamy eggnog dusted with nutmeg top a long list of things associated with the Christmas season, that traditional time of homecoming and cheer for Christians and many non-Christians alike.

But there are family rituals - some new, some as old as yule logs and mistletoe - that are not always recognized as such.

Social researchers say that structural changes in family life and the external culture's entry into the family circle in the form of television have exerted powerful influences on how Christmas is observed, despite what appears to be a common longing to preserve the traditional ways of celebrating. These are some examples:

- If voices of carolers drifting through a frosty night are the idealized sounds of Christmas, the voice of George Bailey cursing his bad fortune in the Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life on television is more often heard in American homes.

- While Christmas dinner for family and friends is celebrated as a unifying ritual, working women are finding it difficult to spend the hours preparing it.

- And the ritual debate on materialism that accompanies gift giving is played out this year against a gloomy economic backdrop that invites guilt for spending too much or too little.

The day itself, whether observed with religious piety or festive holiday spirit, touches emotional roots so deep that nearly everyone has adopted rituals associated with it. This is true even if, like Scrooge, the ritual for some is the effort to ignore Christmas.

When events like divorce and remarriage take place and Christmastime rituals are forced to accommodate newcomers to a family setting, the changes can be very disturbing.

But some authorities, like Dr. Steven J. Wolin, a Washington psychiatrist, think it is a good thing that the rituals don't remain static.

''An issue that keeps coming up in my clinical work is that people don't realize ritual involves both continuity and change,'' Wolin said. ''They think it's all continuity. People feel if they are changing holiday rituals they must be doing it wrong. I tell them if they don't change, the rituals will become hollow and die.''

Still, there can be fierce resistance.

Because of powerful childhood memories that haunt the back corridors of the mind, it is not unusual for grown-ups to become cross and pouty if prized Christmas rituals are challenged or usurped.

How many newly married couples find themselves disagreeing on ways to trim a Christmas tree, asked Dr. William J. Doherty, director of the marriage and family therapy program at the University of Minnesota.

What if one grew up in a family that meticulously decorated each branch with tinsel, strand by silvery strand, and the other came from a long line of tinsel-tossers? What if he comes from a blue spruce family and she from a family of Douglas fir fanciers?

Something more than esthetics, Doherty proposed, is at work in such cases. The ''correct way'' in the mind of each spouse may be an emotionally potent link to a parent, dead or alive.

Thus, breaking with childhood memories in the reverential glow of Christmas can invite anger or tears.